Secretary Hagel, Secretary
Mabus, Admirals Greenert and Hilarides, Mayor Gray, leaders from across
this city and our Armed Forces, to all the outstanding first responders,
and, most of all, the families whose hearts have been broken:

We cannot begin to
comprehend your loss. We know that no words we offer today are equal to
the magnitude, to the depths of that loss. But we come together as a
grateful nation to honor your loved ones, to grieve with you, and to
offer, as best we can, some solace and comfort.

On the night that we lost
Martin Luther King Jr. to a gunman's bullet, Robert Kennedy stood before
a stunned and angry crowd in Indianapolis and
he broke the terrible
news. And in the anguish of that moment, he turned to the words of an
ancient Greek poet, Aeschylus:

Even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Pain
which cannot forget -- drop by drop upon the heart.

The tragedy and the pain
that brings us here today is extraordinary. It is unique. The lives that
were taken from us were unique. The memories their loved ones carry are
unique, and they will carry them and endure long after the news cameras
are gone. But part of what wears on as well is the sense that this has
happened before. Part of what wears on us, what troubles us so deeply as
we gather here today, is how this senseless violence that took place in
the Navy Yard echoes other recent tragedies.

As President, I have now
grieved with five American communities ripped apart by mass violence:
Fort Hood.
Tucson.
Aurora.
Sandy Hook. And now, the Washington Navy
Yard. And these mass shootings occur against a backdrop of daily
tragedies, as an epidemic of gun violence tears apart communities across
America -- from the streets of Chicago to neighborhoods not far from
here.

And so, once again, we
remember our fellow Americans who were just going about their day doing
their jobs, doing what they loved -- in this case, the unheralded work
that keeps our country strong and our Navy the finest fleet in the
world. These patriots doing their work that they were so proud of, and
who have now been taken away from us by unspeakable violence.

Once more we come together
to mourn the lives of beauty and to comfort the wonderful families who
cherished them. Once more we pay tribute to all who rushed towards the
danger, who risked their lives so others might live, and who are in our
prayers today, including Officer Scott Williams. Once more our hearts
are broken. Once more we ask why. Once more we seek strength and wisdom
through God's grace.

You and your families,
this Navy family, are still in the early hour of your grief. And I'm
here today to say that there is nothing routine about this tragedy.
There is nothing routine about your loss. Your loved ones will not be
forgotten. They will endure in the hearts of the American people and in
the hearts of the Navy that they helped to keep strong, and the hearts
of their coworkers and their friends and their neighbors.
"I want them to know how she lived," Jessica Gaarde said of her mother
Kathy. "She is not a number, or some statistic." None of these 12 fellow
Americans are statistics. Today, I want every American to see how these
men and women lived. You may have never met them, but you know them.
They're your neighbors -- like Arthur Daniels, out there on the weekend,
polishing his white Crown Victoria; and Kenneth Proctor, with his
beloved yellow Mustang, who, if you asked, would fix your car, too.

She was the friendly face
at the store. Sylvia Frasier, with her unforgettable gold hair, who took
a second job at Walmart because, she said, she just loved working with
people. She was the diehard fan you sat next to at the game. Kathy
Gaarde loved her hockey and her Caps, a season ticket holder for 25
years.

They were the volunteers
who made your community better. Frank Kohler, giving dictionaries to
every third-grader in his county; Marty Bodrog, leading the children's
Bible study at church. They lived the American Dream -- like Kisan
Pandit, who left everything he knew in India for this land of
opportunity, and raised a wonderful family and dedicated himself to the
United States Navy. They were proud veterans -- like Gerald Read, who
wore the Army uniform for more than 25 years; and Michael Arnold, who
became one of the Navy's leading architects, of whom a colleague said,
"nobody knew those ships like him."

They were dedicated
fathers -- like Mike Ridgell, coaching his daughter's softball teams,
joining Facebook just to keep up with his girls, one of whom said, "he
was always the cool dad." They were loving mothers -- like Mary Francis
Knight, devoted to her daughters, and who had just recently watched with
joy as her older daughter got married. They were doting grandparents --
like John Johnson, always smiling, giving bear hugs to his 10
grandchildren, and who would have welcomed his 11th grandchild this
fall.

These are not statistics.
They are the lives that have been taken from us. This is how far a
single act of violence can ripple. A husband has lost his wife. Wives
have lost their husbands. Sons and daughters have lost their moms and
their dads. Little children have lost their grandparents. Hundreds in
our communities have lost a neighbor, and thousands here have lost a
friend.

As has been mentioned, for
one family, the Daniels family, old wounds are ripped open again.
Priscilla has lost Arthur, her husband of 30 years. Only a few years
ago, as Mayor Gray indicated, another shooting took the life of their
son, just 14 years old. "I can't believe this is happening again,"
Priscilla says.

So these families have
endured a shattering tragedy. It ought to be a shock to us all as a
nation and as a people. It ought to obsess us. It ought to lead to some
sort of transformation. That's what happened in other countries when
they experienced similar tragedies. In the United Kingdom, in Australia,
when just a single mass shooting occurred in those countries, they
understood that there was nothing ordinary about this kind of carnage.
They endured great heartbreak, but they also mobilized and they changed,
and mass shootings became a great rarity.

And yet, here in the
United States, after the round-of-clock coverage on cable news, after
the heartbreaking interviews with families, after all the speeches and
all the punditry and all the commentary, nothing happens. Alongside the
anguish of these American families, alongside the accumulated outrage so
many of us feel, sometimes I fear there's a creeping resignation that
these tragedies are just somehow the way it is, that this is somehow the
new normal.

We can't accept this. As
Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there is
nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they
work. There is nothing normal about our children being gunned down in
their classrooms. There is nothing normal about children dying in our
streets from stray bullets.

No other advanced nation
endures this kind of violence -- none. Here in America, the murder rate
is three times what it is in other developed nations. The murder rate
with guns is ten times what it is in other developed nations. And there
is nothing inevitable about it. It comes about because of decisions we
make or fail to make. And it falls upon us to make it different.

Sometimes it takes an
unexpected voice to break through, to help remind us what we know to be
true. And we heard one of those voices last week. Dr. Janis Orlowski's
team at Medstar Washington Hospital Center treated the wounded. And in
the midst of one of her briefings, she spoke with heartbreaking honesty
as somebody who sees, daily and nightly, the awful carnage of so much
violence. We are a great country, she said, but "there's something
wrong." All these shootings, all these victims, she said, "this is not
America." "It is a challenge to all of us," she said, and "we have to
work together to get rid of this."

And that's the wisdom we
should be taking away from this tragedy and so many others -- not
accepting these shootings as inevitable, but asking what can we do to
prevent them from happening again and again and again. I've said before,
we cannot stop every act of senseless violence. We cannot know every
evil that lurks in troubled minds. But if we can prevent even one
tragedy like this, save even one life, spare other families what these
families are going through, surely we've got an obligation to try.

It's true that each of the
tragedies I've mentioned is different. And in this case, it's clear we
need to do a better job of securing our military facilities and deciding
who gets access to them. And as Commander in Chief, I have ordered a
review of procedures up and down the chain, and I know that Secretary
Hagel is moving aggressively on that. As a society, it's clear we've got
to do a better job of ensuring that those who need mental health care
actually get it, and that in those efforts we don't stigmatize those who
need help. Those things are clear, and we've got to move to address
them.

But we Americans are not
an inherently more violent people than folks in other countries. We're
not inherently more prone to mental health problems. The main difference
that sets our nation apart, what makes us so susceptible to so many mass
shootings, is that we don't do enough -- we don't take the basic,
common-sense actions to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and
dangerous people. What's different in America is it's easy to get your
hands on gun -- and a lot of us know this. But the politics are
difficult, as we saw again this spring. And that's sometimes where the
resignation comes from -- the sense that our politics are frozen and
that nothing will change.

Well, I cannot accept
that. I do not accept that we cannot find a common-sense way to preserve
our traditions, including our basic Second Amendment freedoms and the
rights of law-abiding gun owners, while at the same time reducing the
gun violence that unleashes so much mayhem on a regular basis. And it
may not happen tomorrow and it may not happen next week, it may not
happen next month -- but it will happen. Because it's the change that we
need, and it's a change overwhelmingly supported by the majority of
Americans.

By now, though, it should
be clear that the change we need will not come from Washington, even
when tragedy strikes Washington. Change will come the only way it ever
has come, and that's from the American people. So the question now is
not whether, as Americans, we care in moments of tragedy. Clearly, we
care. Our hearts are broken -- again. And we care so deeply about these
families. But the question is, do we care enough?

Do we care enough to keep
standing up for the country that we know is possible, even if it's hard,
and even if it's politically uncomfortable? Do we care enough to sustain
the passion and the pressure to make our communities safer and our
country safer? Do we care enough to do everything we can to spare other
families the pain that is felt here today?

Our tears are not enough.
Our words and our prayers are not enough. If we really want to honor
these 12 men and women, if we really want to be a country where we can
go to work, and go to school, and walk our streets free from senseless
violence, without so many lives being stolen by a bullet from a gun,
then we're going to have to change. We're going to have to change.

On Monday morning, these
12 men and women woke up like they did every day. They left home and
they headed off to work. Gerald Read's wife Cathy said, "See you tonight
for dinner." And John Johnson looked at his wife Judy and said what he
always said whenever they parted, "Goodbye beautiful. I love you so
much."

"Even in our sleep, pain
which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own
despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What Robert Kennedy
understood, what Dr. King understood, what all our great leaders have
always understood, is that wisdom does not come from tragedy alone or
from some sense of resignation in the fallibility of man. Wisdom comes
through the recognition that tragedies such as this are not inevitable,
and that we possess the ability to act and to change, and to spare
others the pain that drops upon our hearts. So in our grief, let us seek
that grace. Let us find that wisdom. And in doing so, let us truly honor
these 12 American patriots.

May God hold close the
souls taken from us and grant them eternal peace. May He comfort and
watch over these families. And may God grant us the strength and the
wisdom to keep safe our United States of America.